Mac|Life multi-touch RSS Feed

Give Your Magic Mouse More Gestures

Cory Bohon — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:38:44 -0600

The new Apple Magic Mouse might be magical in some regards, but many owners are bummed because the mouse can’t do some of the cool Multi-Touch functions that the iPhone can.

MouseWizard, a small and inexpensive application for the Mac, hopes to remedy this situation by bringing even more Multi-Touch goodness to the Magic Mouse. The application, which costs $2.50, adds four additional functions to your Magic Mouse: Middle Click, Fourth Click, Zoom/Shrink, and Sleep.

The fourth click is customizable for Exposé, Dashboard, and Spotlight, and is accomplished by placing two fingers on the mouse surface, one on the right edge and one on the left. The selected action will then be completed without even having to do a click.

The Zoom/Shrink function is probably one of the coolest reasons to own a Magic Mouse and this software because it allows you to zoom in and out iPhone style by pinching and stretching two fingers across the surface. It works in many applications and can come in handy when you need to zoom in on an image or PDF in Preview.

The last new function that MouseWizard will give you is the ability to sleep your computer by covering the entire mouse surface with your hand and clicking.

The MouseWizard software is a simple application that stays in the menu bar. When you click its icon you will be able to set your preferences in a System Preferences styled window, complete with a testing area to try out the gestures. The application must remain open in order to keep using the new gestures.

Overall, we found this application to be a great addition to the already great Magic Mouse. We also discovered that if you own a MacBook Pro that you can also use this software to give your Multi-Touch trackpad some additional features.

You can get a 10-day trial of the MouseWizard software from the developer's website.

Apple To Release a Touch Screen Remote for Apple TV?

Cory Bohon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:03:19 -0500

A new rumor speculates that Apple could be hard at work creating a touch screen remote for the Apple TV. We're calling fake, but many multi-touch hopefuls are wishing for it to become a reality. The Boy Genius Report breaks the news with a picture of the speculative remote control device that supposedly only works with the Apple TV.

BGR notes that this rumor is from the same person who accurately predicted that Apple would be releasing a new version of iTunes that allowed for home screen organization. The tipster told BGR that the remote launch would possibly coincide with a revamped Apple TV launch.

Of course, this remote could definitely cause more of a gripe than the $19 plastic Apple remote that is being sold today.

CoreLocate on the Snow Leopard Where They Multi-Touched You

Danny Estrada — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:01:58 -0600

The latest seeded version of Mac OS X 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, is said to include some tasty treats for developers. One being the inclusion of CoreLocations, a fancy little feature adopted from the iPhone. CoreLocation allows developers to ID a Macs current latitude and longitude based on available information. We believe it works by harnessing the combined dream powers of unicorns and puppy dogs, but AppleInsider.com seems to think other wise.

Instead of using a GPS signal like the iPhone 3G, CoreLocation would use the existing network hardware to triangulate your Mac's current location. If anything, this feature would provide the perfect excuse to use "I am triangulating your location right now," in causal conversation. You'll be one Kevlar vest away from being a Navy Seal Black Ops agent.

Along with helping you train to be apart of a secret reconnaissance task force, Snow Leopard might also be able to bring you one step closer to thinking you have a tablet MacBooks. Mac OS X 10.6 is said to have some Multi-Touch framework magic included to help developers to create some helpful apps that would support the Multi-Touch trackpad. Support for these API's seem to be on the rise with developers, but nothing steady or solid has been shown yet.

Firefox Getting Multi-Touch Gestures?

David W. Martin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:20:25 -0500

According to a post on Edward Lee's blog, Firefox may be getting multi-touch gestures in one of it's future releases. Edward recently upgraded to a new MacBook. However, much to his dismay, his new notebook with the fancy glass trackpad and all those gestures would not work in his favorite browser - Firefox. So not to be discouraged, he sought to submit some bug reports to Mozilla and discovered that some of these had already been submitted and even resolved - months ago in fact. Reports were filed for Camino and Firefox. So where the heck are these changes?

We downloaded the current official 3.1 beta version of Firefox from Mozilla. Nope, no multi-touch gestures there. Fortunately, there is a beta version of Firefox that does support multi-touch. if you are interested in trying a version out the multi-touch Firefox you can download the beta browser here.

Give it a try if your interested, but like all Beta software, you should try it on a machine that you do not rely on for daily use. It's a good example of the future possible uses for multi-touch. Hopefully, the developers of Firefox will activate or add these features to a future official Firefox release. Hopefully, other developers will follow suit and we'll all be swiping tapping and multi-touching the day away.